Monday, 4 April 2016

On my desk as I type, a bottle of Cloudwater’s Aus Hopfen
Weisse, just finished. It was juicy and tropically fruity, full of passion
fruit and banana, plus a peppery spiciness and a grown up lemon-brushed
bitterness in the finish; a fascinating beer that managed to hold my attention all
the way down the glass. Later on, I will take myself down to The Bridge Inn,
dog in tow, and order a pint of Punk IPA, whose tropical fruit lushness
(lychees and papaya) and malt sweetness contrasts with an almost Bachian
counter-pint to the buzz-saw bitterness on the finish. If I have time I might
also have a pint of Jaipur, whose lusciousness and lubriciousness puts me in
mind of TS Eliot’s lines at the start of the fifth part of Little Gidding, What
we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a
beginning.

Three great beers, gustatory in their joy, whole-hearted in
the way they splash and spring about on the palate, enablers of taste and
tailored to fun, enjoyment, consideration and a beseechment to a life well led.
Oh, and for those who care about such things, one is served from a bottle,
another is keg, and the final one is cask. As if it really matters.

Also on my desk, newly arrived in the post, still smelling
of the printers (that fresh, brand new aroma that must be partly paper and
partly the glossy, wet umami of ink), a size somewhere between A5 and A4, with
a cover that sports a grid of colour photos and images pertaining to beer, is
something from CAMRA called Shaping the Future. As everything is a project these days, it’s called the Revitalisation
Project, a review, an exercise, a download of thought on the way CAMRA is going
in during a time zone of beers that demand the attention and the attrition a
man walking into a pub (unless of course it was a Belgian pub) in the 1990s
would have thought a purity of fantasy and fancy.

From my limited understanding it’s all about where CAMRA
goes now. Does it embrace all beers or remain what it set out to do when it
started — promote and defend cask-conditioned beer. Does saving pubs fit in and
other things?

To be honest, I’ve been as enervated by the announcement of
this review as much as the whole EU referendum circus — bored and not really
bothered. So why write anything? I suppose as a member, contributor to the
excellent Beer magazine and CAMRA Books
author, I should try and articulate something about it all, but the motivation
is not there. I suppose I should have a look at the website and fill in the
survey in the same way that I will drag myself down to the polling booth on
June 23 or whenever it is (it was hammered into me when growing up one should
always vote, suffragettes etc) and vote, but as the three beers in the first
paragraph demonstrate, I’ve long stopped worrying where my beer comes from,
whether its makers designate it craft, cask, bottle-conditioned,
chill-filtered, pasteurised (well maybe not in this instance), or if it is
served in a gourd or from the polished skull of a captured Frankish knight.
Mind you, I still harbour a dislike for handled glasses and nonics, which are
the work of modern-day devils with the aesthetics of the man who designed the
cardigan.

But to get back to the project that CAMRA is putting
forward, good luck to them and good luck to those who have long geeked off in a
different direction. I’m just going to have a beer and think and talk and write
about what it tastes like, what it does to my life, how it accompanies
Beethoven, Eliot, a game of rugby or football, a conversation with a friend or
a farewell to a friend or just maybe a moment of transcendence; how it props up
an economy, how it defines a region, a district, a country, a way in which one
lives a life; how it conducts itself in the presence of food and how it looks
when it’s spilt on the floor and lapped up by a dog. And maybe that’s what my
future is shaped like.